Hiking the Great Wall takes a while when you stop every 2 minutes to exclaim, often with expletives laced in for emphasis, that you’re
on the Great Wall of China (!!!). It’s one of those moments that you consciously commit to memory, but then by the next day you feel like it never even happened. I suppose it did happen, though, because I have the (sweaty, smoggy) photos to prove it. Despite the miserable July conditions, the trip was a highlight of my stay in China.
We signed up for a 1-day excursion through the Far East International Youth Hostel and boarded a van at the crack of dawn for the 3- to 4-hour trip to the Wall. Two of my friends got off at the first stop, Jinshanling, to hike the 5 miles to Simatai. The rest of us remained on the van for 30 more minutes and got off at Simatai to spend the day (from 10:30am to 3pm) hiking in that area.
Neither of these starting-off points is overly touristy, and we had our share of moments where we were the only people on the Wall for as far as we could see, which is a pretty heady feeling. Sometimes, though, local merchants latch on to you for part of the hike. If you ignore them, they’ll turn to the next hiker; if you buy something, they’ll hike with you all day long. We returned to the van having bought nothing, but my friends that hiked from Jinshanling showed up with matching Olympics hats, shirts, and books. They looked like they’d just come from Disney World.
We ended up hiking from Gate 2 to Gate 8 before turning back, which put us at our van exactly on time for the trip back to Beijing. The path to each gate (the benchmarks of the hike) became steeper as the numbers climbed until we were reaching them by ladder. While not exactly difficult, the hike is harder than I thought it would be. There is an option to take a cable car back down, but we stuck to walking. The most difficult part was probably the 20- to 30-minute hike from the end of the Wall to the van, because my legs were jelly by then. It’s also the point where you begin to run into more people urging you to buy things; at one point, I heard a guy passing by me lament that they were "f***ing with [his]
feng shui." Clearly mean, but kind of apt at the same time. We used the phrase liberally for the rest of the week.
Also messing with our feng shui was the van ride itself—harrowing, to say the least. And I’d put Great Wall toilets in the same category. But overall, this excursion is as magical as you imagine it to be, and Simatai is the perfect portion of the Wall for anyone interested in a less touristy but still accessible (and gorgeous) stretch for hiking.